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In brief

Kernel

Some of the most important network subsystem developers recently met for "Netconf 2011". The conference programme page now offers slides from many of the presentations; Ben Hutchings has summarised the presentation and discussion points he considered most important in an email.

On the occasion of the imminent 20th anniversary of Linux, Linux.com has released a picture gallery of Linus Torvalds; some of the pictures were taken in the early days of Linux.

In a blog posting, filesystem expert Eric Sandeen has analysed how the filesystem code of Btrfs, Ext4 and XFS has been changing in terms of size. Reportedly, XFS is the only filesystem whose codebase has been shrinking although various improvements have recently been made to it; the codebase of XFS is bigger than that of Btrfs and Ext4.

Graphics hardware support

Firmware (eg 1) for the GeForce Fermi generation of graphics chips has recently been added to the DRM-Next development branch within Linux-Next. The firmware will probably be integrated into Linux 3.1 and provides access to the acceleration features of GeForce series 400 and 500 models; this support was initially only available via the firmware that is included in the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

The "Xorg hosted mode" (or "hosted" support) for operating X as a Wayland client is now called "xwayland". The developer involved in renaming it has also written an "xf86-video-wlshm" ("wayland shared memory") graphics driver which is classified as "fake" and simplifies testing this mode, which is currently Intel graphics chip dependent.

The latest posting on the "Irregular Radeon Development Companion" blog discusses the implementation of a Systemd unit that activates the KMS Radeon driver's power saving support.

In mid June, and shortly after the release of the latest regular Kernel Log, AMD released version 11.6 of its proprietary graphics drivers for Linux known as Catalyst or Fglrx. The release notes provide some installation tips – however, there is no information on the advancements this version offers.

Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues has released version 0.13.0 of the autotest framework, which can be used for performing automatic kernel tests.

With version 003, the usbutils now offer a functioning data file compression feature.

James Hunt has released Upstart 1.3, which offers various features that have already been integrated into Ubuntu 11.04.

LKML discussions

Stefan Assmann has submitted revised "badram" patches for discussion. Kernels which offer this feature can be instructed not to use any areas of the working memory that are known to be corrupted. Google employee Andrew Morton pointed out that these patches are similar to a more comprehensive solution used by Google – however, this solution hasn't been prepared for integration into the kernel yet, although reportedly this is on the developers' to-do list.

In his release email for the second version of the "Native Linux KVM Tool", the tool's main developer, Pekka Enberg, had mentioned various benchmark results which indicated that the Qemu-KVM alternative is faster than Qemu-KVM when reading and writing QCOW2 images. In a comment on LWN.net, Enberg said that developers shouldn't read too much into the results. Later, it turned out that a flawed test setup was the reason for the bad Qemu-KVM results.